Therewas a temptation today to dash off a typical New Year's resolutions column, withweakly drawn parallels to legal topics. If most resolutions involve cuttingback on vices and shedding pounds, we could talk about our determination to gocold turkey on our use of hackneyed phrases (e.g., “the next time xhappens will be the first”) and inappropriate pop culture analogies (e.g.,wishing we were in front of Judges Judy or Mathis instead of some hellholejurisdiction), or reducing the weight of our motion papers. But we all knowthat resolutions are destined to be broken. There will come a time in thenot-so-distant future when we tell some poor, put-upon associate that a replybrief cannot possibly exceed five pages, then we will edit it and add ourvarious brilliancies and Homeric catalogues to nudge it closer to fifteenpages. And is there really a need to find a proxy for the excess tonnage point?In a recent run-up to trial, as were surveying a courtroom for locations of thetechnology, including terminals and screens, a techie from Generation Zuncharitably suggested that we could project depo videos on our backside.Moreover, there is a story in today’s Journal of the American Medical Associationthat people who are a bit overweight are less likely to die within any givenperiod than people of normal weight. So much for that resolution. And yes, wewill have the crème brulee.
Weare also not likely to abjure pop culture, certainly not when something likethe following happens. Do any of you find your inbox littered with emails fromlitigation consultants, offering all sorts of free advice on how to woo jurorsand win cases? How many of you ever read that stuff? If you are like us, youprobably feel too busy to give these items even a glance, and you press the deletebutton with ferocity and celerity. But that might be a mistake. While most ofour friends take vacation days in the week between Christmas and New Years, welike to come in the office then, as it is so quiet and peaceful. It is a goodtime to catch up on correspondence, even of the slightly frivolous kind. Weeven took a peek at consultant bulletins. One of them attached a couple of TEDvideos on storytelling and persuasion. If you do not already browse through TEDvideos, you should. The speakers are usually smart and engaging. What’s more,the presentations are done beautifully – they are a remarkable and instructivecontrast to the usual bullet-ridden Power Point presentations that waltz us offto sleep. It reminds us of comedian Don McMillan's bit onLife After Death by PowerPoint.
Oneof the presentations was by Harvard B-school professor and social psychologistAmy Cuddy on body language. Better for you to watch it (it is only about 20minutes long) than accept our summary, but let’s leave it at this: our state ofmind affects our body posture, and the reverse is equally true. Thus, whenpeople are triumphant or dominant, they literally spread out, extending armsand legs and make themselves look bigger. Take a look at Usain Bolt crossingthe finish line. When people are feeling submissive or vulnerable, theycover themselves up and make themselves smaller. That much is obvious. What isfascinating is that if one is gearing up for a presentation/meeting and one isfeeling nervous, going through some victory poses (e.g., hands on hips, feetwide apart) for a few minutes can make one feel more confident. Cuddy ends hertalk with a very personal, touching story about herself, and then urges heraudience to share the story, including the underlying science.
Sowe did. During a New Year’s Eve party, in between the Pictionary and champagne,we recounted Cuddy’s advice about how to “fake it to make it.” We wereexpecting gasps of astonishment. Maybe even some gratitude. Nope. A couple ofour friends merely nodded and said that they had heard about this a couple ofyears ago on Oprah. Score it pop culture 1, litigation consultants 0. We arenot giving up on pop culture just yet.
Weare no longer sure anymore what is the difference between high and low browcultures. Have you seen college course offerings? You (or your kid) cantake classes on Saved By the Bell or the Semiotics of Barney. A lot of whatcalls itself high culture is fixated on low culture. There was an article in thisweek’s NY Times Book Review on collections of essays. One of the essayists,Daniel Mendelsohn, was highly praised. What caught our attention in the reviewwas a reference to an essay Mendelsohn wrote in the NY Review of Books back inFebruary 2011 on Mad Men. We normally steer clear of the NY Review of Books because thereviews usually end up being more of a review of the reviewer’s obsessions thanthe actual work allegedly being reviewed. The articles exude more neurosis andbitterness than illumination. They seem to be written by and for people withmigraines. (We are still smarting from Renata Adler’s long ago takedown ofPauline Kael. Sure, some of Adler’s points about Kael’s verbal tropes werecorrect, but none of the nastiness could dislodge Kael from the Pantheon. It’slike our favorite moment in the Beatles Anthology video, where McCartneywearily recites the chorus of complaints about the White Album, how it hadmoments of self-indulgence and would have made a better single album: “It’s theBeatles' White Album! Shut up!”)
Weare not (yet) putting Mad Men up there with Kael or the Beatles. ButMendelsohn’s article does not convince us that the show is as frail anddispensable as, say, Alf. Mendelsohn’s review of Mad Men is yet another NYRBexercise in dyspepsia. Put plainly, he pretty much hates the show. Mendelsohnis a smart guy and a fine writer, and there’s no way we will do justice to hisanalysis (wrong-headed though it may be). He seems to think that Mad Men,besides suffering from sins of implausible plotting and shallowcharacterizations, depicts the social and business mores of the 1960s onan entirely superficial level. The program almost amounts to Rat Pack eraporn. We look up from our iPad at the tv screen and see characters hoistinghighballs in the afternoon, or see a pregnant woman light up a Marlboro Red,and smile smugly. Mendelsohn does not seem to think that the show digs deeplyenough or explains enough. We are not sure that there is more explanation ortexture in other series that Mendelsohn admires, such as The Sopranos or TheWire, and we suspect that any pat explanation of characters’ motivations wouldbe greeted with contempt by Mendelsohn or some other acerbic critic, and rightlyso. At the end of Mendelsohn’s review he arrives at a conclusion that seemsto us absolutely correct and insightful (and confirmatory of something wealready thought): if the milieu of Mad Men seems opaque, it is because it isviewed not from the perspective of the main characters such as Don Draper or PeggyOlson, but is viewed from the perspective of the kids, who can only gaze attheir misbehaving elders in wonder and fear. The demographic cohort that is inlove with the show is not the people who lived and acted out the doings in theshow (those people would largely now be octogenarians) but babyboomers – thekids of that smoking, boozing, philandering, utterly wonderful, mixed-up, maybe even greatest generation. The self-absorbed boomers never fretted about the interior livesof their parents back then. Now they (we) do. But having direct conversationswith parents on those issues, many of them terribly awkward, is impossibleor irritating or unreliable now. Like most works of art, Mad Men takes us outof ourselves. Shelley (whose life would make a pretty good cable mini-series)said that poetry is a great spiritual and even civic exercise, because it makesus consider about how others live and think and feel.
Itoccurs to us that considering how others live and think and feel has a littlesomething to do with successful litigation. Thus, all kidding aside about thenew JAMA article, we are more likely to put down the spoon than the remotecontrol.
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